What If

Chapter Fifteen - Picking Up The Pieces

Cameron hadn't spoken for three days. Not a word. Physically, she was fine, but mentally...something had broken in her.

Elle was still in the pediatric wing, stable and awake but being monitored. She cried for her mother repeatedly and Cuddy had taken medical proxy for the little girl, devoting hours to simply sitting by her bedside, playing with her, comforting her.

House had distanced himself, spending equal amounts of time locked away in his office, throwing his ball at the wall, or sat in silence next to Cameron's bedside. Neither brought him any comfort, and he hadn't even spoken about it with Wilson. She didn't talk, just sat there staring down at her feet with her knees hugged tight to her chest. She was barely eating and anything she did do just seemed like it was done on autopilot. He had wondered a few times if she was still in there at all.

After 'the incident', as Cuddy and Wilson were calling it, Cameron had been checked over in the ER and then sent for a psych evaluation. Her traumatised response to witnessing her husband blowing his brains out three feet in front of her was pretty damn understandable, House thought, and treating her like a nut case wasn't doing her any good. What little light she had left in her after 'the incident' was rapidly being snubbed out in the suffocating confines of the psych ward. The meds they were dosing her with were numbing everything, draining her of all that she was.

He couldn't stand by and do nothing as she spiralled further into her breakdown. Elle would be ready for discharging in a matter of days and she needed to be with-it enough to be there for that. If she wasn't showing any signs of at least some improvement, social services would get involved and no doubt send the little girl back to Chicago to be looked after by either her grandparents or one of Cameron's siblings. Probably not the youngest one though, House mused. Having her daughter moved five hundred miles away would certainly not aid Cameron's recovery.

Determined to at least try and remedy the situation that would no doubt unfold, House headed for Cuddy's office.

"I need you to sign Cameron over to my care. I want her out of that place."

It wasn't a question, and Cuddy didn't know how to respond at first. Of course, she'd known Cameron and her daughter were living with House after her sudden separation from her husband, but she hadn't known quite how deeply entwined the lives of her best diagnostician and his lovely young Immunologist had become. She'd had her suspicions and over the last month she'd go as far as to say House had seemed...happy. Or maybe content was more like it. He wasn't torturing her, his team, or his patients quite as much. If Cameron was the reason behind that, then Cuddy wasn't about to discredit the Cameron Effect.

She splayed her hands on her desk and measured her words carefully before she spoke them.

"You plan to be her therapist as well as her roommate? She needs-"

"What she needs is to be treated like a woman whose husband just painted the walls of their home with his brain matter right in front of her. She doesn't need to be treated like she's gonna off herself the second she's allowed access to the grown-ups' cutlery. She needs to process it and get all PTSD or whatever, not have every emotion she could possibly feel obliterated by sixteen types of anti-psychotics and antidepressants."

Cuddy was stunned. Sure, he advocated for his treatments, his patients and occasionally for his team, but he never advocated the merits of emotions. Cameron had really done a number on him.

"You want her to feel pain, House? Because that's what she's gonna feel if we take her off the meds."

There was silence for a few moments as her words hung between them. He leaned heavily on his cane, holding her gaze, his eyes so much softer than she'd ever known them.

"I just want her to feel," he said simply, "The meds aren't taking away her pain, they're just stopping us from seeing it. They're making the misery more aesthetically pleasing so we can all feel good about locking her up there. But it's not helping her."

He'd made his point loud and clear. And she hated to admit it, but he was right. The best place for Cameron was certainly not a bedroom stripped bare of any comfort, or a day room with a handful of schizophrenics and Jesus. Keeping her there made everyone else feel like they were doing their best for her, but really they were just hiding her pain and misery somewhere they wouldn't trip over it or have to face it at all.

"If I release her into your care, there are gonna be conditions."

She looked at him sternly but they both knew he'd won. She wasn't doing it for him though, and they both knew that too. He gave an almost-imperceptable nod and waited patiently for the conditions to be set. Cuddy sighed.

"Firstly, I want her to keep seeing a psychiatrist at least two days a week. You may have softened up a bit where Cameron's concerned, but you're not exactly the poster boy for getting in touch with feelings."

She waited for a response from him and he gave a small, noncommittal shrug. She'd half-expected him to jump to his own defence when she accused him of losing his edge because of Cameron, but he chose to stay quiet so she continued.

"I also want her to stay on some of the meds. Taking her off everything would be like taking you off Vicodin. Let's ease her back into reality instead of pushing her off the roof. She stays on Fluoxetine."

He hesitated momentarily but seemed to decide acquiescing was in his best interests. So he nodded again, his face remaining stoically bare of emotions. She couldn't read him.

"Lastly, she does not come back to work until she's had at least six weeks of treatment. When she's back on her feet, you know as well as I do that she'll push herself to come back before she's really ready to."

He fully agreed with the last condition, even if he wasn't completely convinced by the other two. But he agreed to them all and Cuddy picked up the phone, dialling through to the third floor. As she waited for the psych ward to answer, she looked up at House. If the situation had been different, she and Wilson would have no doubt picked apart his defending Cameron, pushing him into admitting he had feelings for her. But she didn't need an admission from him, because she could see very easily that he'd fallen for the younger doctor. Part of her couldn't help but wonder if he'd intentionally sabotaged his relationship with Stacy because of feelings for Cameron.

Finally, one of the psych nurses answered and put her through to Cameron's psychiatrist, Dr. Goldberg.

House watched her side of the conversation. It was very apparent that Goldberg was completely unconvinced discharging Cameron was the best option, especially considering she hadn't even spoken once since she'd been admitted, but the Dean of Medicine was always going to have the last word. Their conversation went back-and-forth for several minutes before she finally thanked him and hung up. Turning back to House, she sighed and shook her head.

"They're not gonna let her out today, not if we're taking her off the meds. They'll have her under observation for twenty-four hours...then she's all yours."

House gave her a succinct nod, pausing to hold her eye contact for a moment longer than necessary. She knew that was his way of thanking her as sincerely as he could so she offered him a smile to acknowledge it. As he began to leave, she called out to him.

"House. Take care of her."

The corner of his mouth turned upward a fraction of an inch and if she hadn't known him for as long as she had, she would have missed it. But she didn't miss it. Cameron would be just fine and Cuddy knew she'd made the right decision.

House peered through the open doorway, his eyes falling to rest on the defeated, small figure curled into herself on the bed. He was sure that without the psych intervention, without all the meds they were pumping into her, she wouldn't have given up. Now, sat in the middle of a hard bed with thin, scratchy linen irritating the skin wherever it touched, she reminded him of a lost child. She was thinner and paler than ever but House knew she was stronger than anyone was giving her credit for. She might look fragile and broken, but who wouldn't if they were sectioned to a ward where the only company to keep was either her own dark thoughts or the handful of genuinely crazy people, turned into living zombies by their concoction of psych meds?

It had now been almost eight hours since they'd stopped her cocktail of doses and he was somewhat comforted knowing she could leave the following morning. He wasn't sure if it was wishful thinking on his part, but she already seemed to be emerging from the haze. As he shuffled into her room and sat down heavily on the chair beside her bed, the way he had done numerous times each day since her admission, her eyes followed him and she lifted her head from her knees. She shifted on the bed, slowly swinging her legs over the side, her hands either side of her hips, holding her slight weight as she leaned forward a fraction. She sighed softly, almost inaudibly. But House caught it and looked at her intently.

Once again she lifted her eyes to meet his and House realized he was holding his breath. He waited, not daring to move, hoping for something. Anything. She swallowed hard, her mouth still dry from the antidepressants.

"I want to go home."

She whispered, her heart feeling almost as hollow as her voice. House let go of the breath he'd been holding; he'd never been so relieved to hear her voice. Fighting the urge to take her into his arms for fear of spooking her back to the near-catatonic state she'd been in for the last three days, he simply nodded.

"I'm taking you home tomorrow."

She regarded him carefully and he nodded, assuring her that he wasn't joking. A ghost of a smile settled on her lips and he shifted his gaze to his cane, not wanting her to know that seeing her smile, even though it barely touched the edge of her lips, made his heart soar. Oh boy, he was in trouble. And hope always scared him.

"And Elle?"

He met her gaze again and nodded.

"She's fine. She's been making Cuddy's ovaries ache for the last three days."

A comfortable quiet enveloped them. The voices in the day room were just a faded murmur punctuating the near-silence of what he could only see as a cell. This was Cameron's own personal hell, trapped in a room and pumped with drugs so that her mind wasn't even her own. If she showed any signs of experiencing grief after her loss, like any normal person would, they told her she was spiralling. She needed the mourning process to be normalized, not attributed to a mental breakdown, and it was a huge relief for her that Cuddy had apparently agreed with this. She watched House sitting beside her and she knew without him she'd have probably been spending a lot longer trapped in her own mind. She wondered momentarily what he'd said to Cuddy for her to agree to him taking her home. But she quickly decided she didn't care. All she cared about now was getting out, holding her daughter and trying to pick up the pieces of her life.